Robots Being Trained to Understand Handling of Objects

Just like the infants, researchers want the robots also to understand the nature of objects and their utilization on their own.

Ashutosh Saxena at Cornell University Personal Robotics Lab and his team are working on making the robots understand the objects around them handle them according to their understanding so that they get adapted to the environment.

The researchers had made the robots view a number of cups, but the major thing that they were trying to make them notice is to handle the cups, which they need to grasp in order to hold the cup in the right manner.

Researcher Saxena has found the major problem faced was not holding the cup, but placing it on a surface in the right manner. As per Saxena, "We just show the robot some examples and it learns to generalize the placing strategies and applies them to objects that were not seen before".

The researcher had found that the robots were capable of understanding the simple logic behind things and were found to be performing the task accurately 98% times, if they already knew about the object. If the object was new to robots, they still performed 95% times in a correct manner.